NEUROSCIENCE AND MORAL POLITICS: Chomsky’s Intellectual Progeny

Throughout the world, teachers, sociologists, policymakers and parents are discovering that empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.
—Arundhati Ray

The official directives needn’t be explicit to be well
understood: Do not let too much empathy move in unauthorized directions.
—Norman Solomon

The nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world’s
most eminent scientists, “What are you optimistic about? Why?”
In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni cites the
proliferating experimental work into the neural mechanisms that
reveal how humans are “wired for empathy.”

Iacoboni’s optimism is grounded in his belief that, with
the popularization of scientific insights, these recent findings
in neuroscience will seep into public awareness and “. . .
this explicit level of understanding our empathic nature will at
some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our
societies and that threaten to destroy us.” (Iacoboni, 2007,
p. 14)

While there are reasons to remain skeptical (see below) about
the progressive political implications flowing from this work, a
body of impressive empirical evidence reveals that the roots of
prosocial behavior, including moral sentiments such as empathy,
precede the evolution of culture. This work sustains Noam Chomsky’s
visionary writing about a human moral instinct, and his assertion
that, while the principles of our moral nature have been poorly
understood, “we can hardly doubt their existence or their
central role in our intellectual and moral lives.” (Chomsky,
1971, n.p., 1988; 2005, p. 263)

In his influential book Mutual Aid (1972, p. 57; 1902),
the Russian revolutionary anarchist, geographer, and naturalist
Petr Kropotkin, maintained that “. . . under any circumstances
sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.
Those species which willingly abandon it are doomed to decay.”
Species cooperation provided an evolutionary advantage, a “natural”
strategy for survival.

While Kropotkin readily acknowledged the role of competition, he
asserted that mutual aid was a “moral instinct” and
“natural law.” Based on his extensive studies of the
animal world, he believed that this predisposition toward helping
one another—human sociality—was of “prehuman origin.”
Killen and Cords, in a fittingly titled piece “Prince Kropotkin’s
Ghost,” suggest that recent research in developmental psychology
and primatology seems to vindicate Kropotkin’s century-old
assertions (2002).

The emerging field of the neuroscience of empathy parallels investigations
being undertaken in cognate fields. Some forty years ago the celebrated
primatologist Jane Goodall observed and wrote about chimpanzee emotions,
social relationships, and “chimp culture,” but experts
remained skeptical. A decade ago, the famed primate scientist Frans
B.M. de Waal (1996) wrote about the antecedents to morality in Good
Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals,
but scientific consensus remained elusive.

All that’s changed. As a recent editorial in the journal
Nature (2007) put it, it’s now “unassailable
fact” that human minds, including aspects of moral thought,
are the product of evolution from earlier primates. According to
de Waal, “You don’t hear any debate now.” In his
more recent work, de Waal plausibly argues that human morality—including
our capacity to empathize—is a natural outgrowth or inheritance
of behavior from our closest evolutionary relatives.

Following Darwin, highly sophisticated studies by biologists Robert
Boyd and Peter Richerson posit that large-scale cooperation within
the human species—including with genetically unrelated individuals
within a group—was favored by selection. (Hauser, 2006,
p. 416) Evolution selected for the trait of empathy because there
were survival benefits in coming to grips with others. In his book,
People of the Lake (1978) the world-renowned paleoanthropologist
Richard Leakey unequivocally declares, “We are human because
our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an
honored network of obligation.”

Studies have shown that empathy is present in very young children,
even at eighteen months of age and possibly younger. In the primate
world, Warneken and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute at Leipzig,
Germany, recently found that chimps extend help to unrelated chimps
and unfamiliar humans, even when inconvenienced and regardless of
any expectation of reward. This suggests that empathy may lie behind
this natural tendency to help and that it was a factor in the social
life of the common ancestor to chimpanzees and humans at the split
some six million years ago (New Scientist, 2007; Warneken
and Tomasello, 2006). It’s now indisputable that we share
moral faculties with other species (de Waal, 2006; Trivers, 1971;
Katz, 2000; Gintis, 2005; Hauser, 2006; Bekoff, 2007; Pierce, 2007).
Pierce notes that there are “countless anecdotal accounts
of elephants showing empathy toward sick and dying animals, both
kin and non-kin” (2007, p. 6). And recent research in Kenya
has conclusively documented elephant’s open grieving/empathy
for other dead elephants.

Mogil and his team at McGill University recently demonstrated that
mice feel distress when they observe other mice experiencing pain.
They tentatively concluded that the mice engaged visual cues to
bring about this empathic response (Mogil, 2006; Ganguli, 2006).
De Waal’s response to this study: “This is a highly
significant finding and should open the eyes of people who think
empathy is limited to our species.” (Carey, 2006)

Further, Grufman and other scientists at the National Institutes
of Health have offered persuasive evidence that altruistic acts
activate a primitive part of the brain, producing a pleasurable
response (2007). And recent research by Koenigs and colleagues (2007)
indicates that within the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the ventromedial
prefrontal cortex or VMPC is required for emotions and moral judgment.
Damage to the VMPC has been linked to psychopathic behavior. This
led to the belief that as a rule, psychopaths do not experience
empathy or remorse.

A study by Miller (2001) and colleagues of the brain disorder frontotemporal
dementia (FTD) is also instructive. FTD attacks the frontal lobes
and anterior temporal lobes, the site of one’s sense of self.
One early symptom of FTD is the loss of empathy.

We know from neuroscientific empathy experiments that the same
affective brain circuits are automatically mobilized upon feeling
one’s own pain and the pain of others. Through brain imaging,
we also know that separate neural processing regions then free up
the capacity to take action. As Decety notes, empathy then allows
us to “forge connections with people whose lives seem utterly
alien from us” (Decety, 2006, p. 2). Where comparable experience
is lacking, this “cognitive empathy” builds on the neural
basis and allows one to “actively project oneself into the
shoes of another person” by trying to imagine the other person’s
situation (Preston, in press), Preston and de Waal (2002). Empathy
is “other directed,” the recognition of the other’s
humanity.

***

So where does this leave us? If morality is rooted in biology,
in the raw material or building blocks for the evolution of its
expression, we now have a pending fortuitous marriage of hard science
and secular morality in the most profound sense. The technical details
of the social neuroscientific analysis supporting these assertions
lie outside this paper, but suffice it to say that progress is proceeding
at an exponential pace and the new discoveries are persuasive (Decety
and Lamm, 2006; Lamm, 2007; Jackson, 2004 and 2006).

That said, one of the most vexing problems that remains to be
explained is why so little progress has been made in extending this
empathic orientation to distant lives, to those outside certain
in-group moral circles. Given a world rife with overt and structural
violence, one is forced to explain why our deep-seated moral intuition
doesn’t produce a more ameliorating effect, a more peaceful
world. Iacoboni suggests this disjuncture is explained by massive
belief systems, including political and religious ones, operating
on the reflective and deliberate level. These tend to override the
automatic, pre-reflective, neurobiological traits that should bring
people together.

Here a few cautionary notes are warranted. The first is that social
context and triggering conditions are critical because, where there
is conscious and massive elite manipulation, it becomes exceedingly
difficult to get in touch with our moral faculties. Ervin Staub,
a pioneering investigator in the field, acknowledges that even if
empathy is rooted in nature, people will not act on it “.
. . unless they have certain kinds of life experiences that shape
their orientation toward other human beings and toward themselves
(Staub, 2002, p. 222). As Jensen puts it, “The way we are
educated and entertained keep us from knowing about or understanding
the pain of others” (2002). Circumstances may preclude and
overwhelm our perceptions, rendering us incapable of recognizing
and giving expression to moral sentiments (Albert, n.d.; and also,
Pinker, 2002). For example, the fear-mongering of artificially created
scarcity may attenuate the empathic response. The limitation placed
on exposure is another. As reported recently in The New York
Times, the Pentagon imposes tight embedding restrictions on
journalist’s ability to run photographs and other images of
casualties in Iraq. Photographs of coffins returning to Dover Air
Base in Delaware are simply forbidden. Memorial services for the
fallen are also now prohibited even if the unit gives its approval.

The second cautionary note is Hauser’s (2006) observation
that proximity was undoubtedly a factor in the expression of empathy.
In our evolutionary past an attachment to the larger human family
was virtually incomprehensible and, therefore, the emotional connection
was lacking. Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist, adds
that “We evolved in a world where people in trouble right
in front of you existed, so our emotions were tuned to them, whereas
we didn’t face the other kind of situation.” He suggests
that to extend this immediate emotion-linked morality—one
based on fundamental brain circuits—to unseen victims requires
paying less attention to intuition and more to the cognitive dimension.
If this boundary isn’t contrived, it would seem, at a minimum,
circumstantial and thus worthy of reassessing morality (Greene,
2007, n.p.). Given some of the positive dimensions of globalization,
the potential for identifying with the “stranger” has
never been more robust.

Finally, as Preston (2006-2007; and also, in press) suggests,
risk and stress tend to suppress empathy whereas familiarity and
similarity encourage the experience of natural, reflexive empathy.
This formidable but not insurmountable challenge warrants further
research into how this “out-group” identity is created
and reinforced.

It may be helpful, as Halpern (1993, p. 169) suggests, to think
of empathy as a sort of spark of natural curiosity, prompting a
need for further understanding and deeper questioning. However,
our understanding of how or whether political engagement follows
remains in its infancy and demands further investigation.

***

Almost a century ago, Stein (1917) wrote about empathy as “the
experience of foreign consciousness in general.” Salles’
film The Motorcycle Diaries addresses empathy, albeit indirectly.
The film follows Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and his friend Alberto
Granada on an eight-month trek across Argentina, Peru, Columbia,
Chile and Venezuela.

When leaving his leafy, upper middle-class suburb (his father is
an architect) in Buenos Aires in 1952, Guevara is 23 and a semester
away from earning his medical degree. The young men embark on an
adventure, a last fling before settling down to careers and lives
of privilege. They are preoccupied with women, fun and adventure
and certainly not seeking or expecting a life-transforming odyssey.

The film’s power is in its depiction of Guevara’s
emerging political awareness that occurs as a consequence of unfiltered
cumulative experiences. During their 8,000-mile journey, they encounter
massive poverty, exploitation, and brutal working conditions, all
consequences of an unjust international economic order. By the end,
Guevara has turned away from being a doctor because medicine is
limited to treating the symptoms of poverty. For him, revolution
becomes the expression of empathy, the only effective way to address
suffering’s root causes. This requires melding the cognitive
component of empathy with engagement, with resistance against asymmetrical
power, always an inherently political act. Otherwise, empathy has
no meaning. (This roughly parallels the political practice of brahma-viharas
by engaged Buddhists.) In his own oft-quoted words (not included
in the film), Guevara stated that, “The true revolutionary
is guided by a great feeling of love.”

Paul Farmer, the contemporary medical anthropologist, infectious-disease
specialist and international public health activist, has adopted
different tactics, but his diagnosis of the “pathologies of
power” is remarkably similar to Guevara. He also writes approvingly
of Cuba’s health programs, comparing them with his long work
experience in Haiti. Both individuals were motivated early on by
the belief that artificial epidemics have their origin in unjust
socioeconomic structures, hence the need for social medicine, a
“politics as medicine on a grand scale.” Both exemplify
exceptional social outliers of engaged empathy and the interplay
of affective, cognitive and moral components. For Farmer’s
radical critique of structural violence and the connections between
disease and social inequality, see (Farmer, 2003; Kidder, 2003).
Again, it remains to be explained why there is such a paucity of
real world examples of empathic behavior? Why is U.S. culture characterized
by a massive empathy deficit of almost pathological proportions?
And what might be reasonably expected from a wider public understanding
of the nature of empathy?

Hauser posits a “universal moral grammar,” hard-wired
into our neural circuits via evolution. This neural machinery precedes
conscious decisions in life-and-death situations, however, we observe
“nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide
us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems.” At
other points, he suggests that environmental factors can push individuals
toward defective moral reasoning, and the various outcomes for a
given local culture are seemingly limitless. (Hauser, 2006) For
me, this discussion of cultural variation fails to give sufficient
attention to the socioeconomic variables responsible for shaping
the culture.

“It all has to do with the quality of justice and the availability
of opportunity.” (2006, p. 151). Earlier, Goldschmidt (1999,
n.p.) argued that, “Culturally derived motives may replace,
supplement or override genetically programmed behavior.”

Cultures are rarely neutral, innocent phenomena but are consciously
set up to reward some people and penalize others. As Parenti (2006)
forcefully asserts, certain aspects of culture can function as instruments
of social power and social domination through ideological indoctrination.
Culture is part and parcel of political struggle, and studying culture
can reveal how power is exercised and on whose behalf.

Cohen and Rogers, in parsing Chomsky’s critique of elites,
note that “Once an unjust order exists, those benefiting from
it have both an interest in maintaining it and, by virtue of their
social advantages, the power to do so.” (Cohen, 1991, p. 17)
(For a concise but not uncritical treatment of Chomsky’s social
and ethical views, see Cohen, 1991.) Clearly, the vaunted human
capacity for verbal communication cuts both ways. In the wrong hands,
this capacity is often abused by consciously quelling the empathic
response. When de Waal writes, “Animals are no moral philosophers,”
I’m left to wonder if he isn’t favoring the former in
this comparison. (de Waal, 1996b, n.p.)

One of the methods employed within capitalist democracies is Chomsky’s
and Herman’s “manufacture of consent,” a form
of highly sophisticated thought control. Potentially active citizens
must be “distracted from their real interests and deliberately
confused about the way the world works.” (Cohen, 1991, p.
7; Chomsky, 1988)

For this essay, and following Chomsky, I’m arguing that
the human mind is the primary target of this perverse “nurture”
or propaganda, in part because exposure to certain new truths about
empathy—hard evidence about our innate moral nature—poses
a direct threat to elite interests. There’s no ghost in the
machine, but the capitalist machine attempts to keep people in line
with an ideological ghost, the notion of a self constructed on market
values. But “. . . if no one saw himself or herself as capitalism
needs them to do, their own self-respect would bar the system from
exploiting and manipulating them.” (Kelleher, 2007) That is,
given the apparent universality of this biological predisposition
toward empathy, we have a potent scientific baseline upon which
to launch further critiques of elite manipulation, this cultivation
of callousness.

In that vein, this new research is entirely consistent with work
on the nature of authentic love and the concrete expression of that
love in the form of care, effort, responsibility, courage and respect.
As Eagleton reminds us, if others are also engaging in this behavior,
“. . . the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides
the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for
this reciprocity is love.” Because reciprocity mandates equality
and an end to exploitation and oppression, it follows that “a
just, compassionate treatment of other people is on the grand scale
of things one of the conditions for one’s own thriving.”
And as social animals, when we act in this way we are realizing
our natures “at their finest.” (2007, pp. 170, 159-160,
and 173) Again, the political question remains that of realizing
a form of global environment that enhances the opportunity for our
nature to flourish.

I’ve noted elsewhere, Fromm’s classic book The
Art of Loving is a blistering indictment of the social and
economic forces that deny us life’s most rewarding experience
and “the only satisfying answer to the problem of human existence.”
For Fromm, grasping how society shapes our human instincts, hence
our behavior, is in turn the key to understanding why “love
thy neighbor,” the love of the stranger, is so elusive in
modern society.

The global capitalist culture with its premium on accumulation
and profits not only devalues an empathic disposition but produces
a stunted character in which everything is transformed into a commodity,
not only things, but individuals themselves. The very capacity to
practice empathy (love) is subordinated to our state religion of
the market in which each person seeks advantage in an alienating
and endless commodity-greedy competition.

Over five decades ago, Fromm persuasively argued that “The
principles of capitalist society and the principles of love are
incompatible.” (Fromm, 1956, p. 110). Any honest person knows
that the dominant features of capitalist society tend to produce
individuals who are estranged from themselves, crippled personalities
robbed of their humanity and in a constant struggle to express empathic
love. Little wonder that Fromm believed radical changes in our social
structure and economic institutions were needed if empathy/love
is to be anything more than a rare individual achievement and a
socially marginal phenomenon. He understood that only when the economic
system serves women and men, rather than the opposite, will this
be possible (Olson, 2006).

***

The dominant cultural narrative of hyper-individualism is challenged
and the insidiously effective scapegoating of human nature that
claims we are motivated by greedy, dog-eat-dog “individual
self-interest is all” is undermined. From original sin to
today’s “selfish gene,” certain interpretations
of human nature have invariably functioned to retard class consciousness.
These new research findings help to refute the allegation that people
are naturally uncooperative, an argument frequently employed to
intimidate and convince people that it’s futile to seek a
better society for everyone. Stripped of yet another rationalization
for empire, predatory behavior on behalf of the capitalist mode
of production becomes ever more transparent. And learning about
the conscious suppression of this essential core of our nature should
beg additional troubling questions about the motives behind other
elite-generated ideologies, from neo-liberalism to the “war
on terror.”

Second, there are implications for students. Cultivating empathic
engagement through education remains a poorly understood enterprise.
College students, for example, may hear the ‘cry of the people’
but the moral sound waves are muted as they pass through a series
of powerful cultural baffles. Williams (1986, p. 143) notes that
“While they may be models of compassion and generosity to
those in their immediate circles, many of our students today have
a blind spot for their responsibilities in the socio-political order.
In the traditional vocabulary they are strong on charity but weak
on justice.”

Nussbaum (1997) defends American liberal education’s record
at cultivating an empathic imagination. She claims that understanding
the lives of strangers and achieving cosmopolitan global citizenship
can be realized through the arts and literary humanities. There
is little solid evidence to substantiate this optimism. My own take
on empathy-enhancing practices within U.S. colleges and universities
is considerably less sanguine. Nussbaum’s episodic examples
of stepping into the mental shoes of other people are rarely accompanied
by plausible answers as why these people may be lacking shoes—or
decent jobs, minimum healthcare, and long-life expectancy. The space
within educational settings has been egregiously underutilized,
in part, because we don’t know enough about propitious interstices
where critical pedagogy could make a difference. Arguably the most
serious barrier is the cynical, even despairing doubt about the
existence of a moral instinct for empathy. The new research puts
this doubt to rest and rightly shifts the emphasis to strategies
for cultivating empathy and identifying with “the other.”
Joining the affective and cognitive dimensions of empathy may require
risky forms of radical pedagogy (Olson, 2006, 2007; Gallo, 1989).
Evidence produced from a game situation with medical students strongly
hints that empathic responses can be significantly enhanced by increased
knowledge about the specific needs of others—in this case,
the elderly (Varkey, 2006). Presumably, limited prior experiences
would affect one’s emotional response. Again, this is a political
culture/information acquisition issue that demands further study.

Third, for many people the basic incompatibility between global
capitalism and the lived expression of moral sentiments may become
obvious for the first time. (Olson, 2006, 2005) For example, the
failure to engage this moral sentiment has radical implications,
not the least being consequences for the planet. Within the next
100 years, one-half of all species now living will be extinct. Great
apes, polar bears, tigers and elephants are all on the road to extinction
due to rapacious growth, habitat destruction, and poaching. These
human activities, not random extinction, will be the undoing of
millions of years of evolution (Purvis, 2000). As Leakey puts it,
“Whatever way you look at it, we’re destroying the Earth
at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming
into the planet. . .” And researchers at McGill University
have shown that economic inequality is linked to high rates of biodiversity
loss. The authors suggest that economic reforms may be the prerequisite
to saving the richness of the ecosystem and urge that “. .
. if we can learn to share the economic resources more fairly with
fellow members of our own species, it may help to share ecological
resources with our fellow species.” (Mikkelson, 2007, p. 5)

While one hesitates imputing too much transformative potential
to this emotional capacity, there is nothing inconsistent about
drawing more attention to inter-species empathy and eco-empathy.
The latter may be essential for the protection of biotic communities.
Decety and Lamm (2006, p. 4) remind us that “. . . one of
the most striking aspects of human empathy is that it can be felt
for virtually any target, even targets of a different species.”

This was foreshadowed at least fifty years ago when Paul Mattick,
writing about Kropotkin’s notion of mutual aid, noted that
“. . . For a long time, however, survival in the animal world
has not depended upon the practice of either mutual aid or competition
but has been determined by the decisions of men as to which species
should live and thrive and which should be exterminated. . . . [W]herever
man rules, the “laws of nature” with regard to animal
life cease to exist.” This applies no less to humans and Mattick
rightly observed that the demands of capital accumulation and capitalist
social relations override and preclude mutual aid. As such, neuroscience
findings are welcome and necessary but insufficient in themselves.
For empathy to flourish requires the elimination of class relations
(Mattick, 1956, pp. 2-3).

Fourth, equally alarming for elites, awareness of this reality
contains the potential to encourage “destabilizing”
but humanity-affirming cosmopolitan attitudes toward the faceless
“other,” both here and abroad. In de Waal’s apt
words, “Empathy can override every rule about how to treat
others.” (de Waal, 2005, p. 9) Amin (2003), for example, proposes
that the new Europe be reframed by an ethos of empathy and engagement
with the stranger as its core value. The diminution of empathy within
the culture reduces pro-social behavior and social cohesiveness.
Given the dangerous centrifugal forces of ethno-nationalism and
xenophobia, nothing less than this unifying motif will suffice,
while providing space for a yet undefined Europe, a people to come.

Finally, as de Waal observes, “If we could manage to see people
on other continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle
of reciprocity and empathy, we would be building upon rather than
going against our nature.” (de Waal, 2005, p. 9) An ethos
of empathy is an essential part of what it means to be human and
empathically impaired societies, societies that fail to gratify
this need should be found wanting. We’ve been systematically
denied a deeper and more fulfilling engagement with this moral sentiment.
I would argue that the tremendous amount of deception and fraud
expended on behalf of overriding empathy is a cause for hope and
cautious optimism. Paradoxically, the relative absence of widespread
empathic behavior is in fact a searing tribute to its potentially
subversive power.

Is it too much to hope that we’re on the verge of discovering
a scientifically based, Archimedean moral point from which to lever
public discourse toward an appreciation of our true nature, which
in turn might release powerful emancipatory forces?

Acknowledgement:

A highly abbreviated version of this paper appeared at www.zmag.org
(5/20/07). Helpful comments were offered by N. Chomsky, D. Dunn,
M. Iacoboni, K. Kelly, S. Preston and J. Wingard. Thanks, per usual,
to M. Ortiz.

___

Gary Olson (olson@moravian.edu) is Professor and
Chair of the Department of Political Science, Moravian College,
Bethlehem, PA.

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